IMPERSONAL INTERVIEW: DONOVAN REYES, author of DENOUEMENT and APOCRYPHA 

I haven’t read the books. I haven’t Googled the author. I haven’t tailored the interview questions or limited the word count. This is a raw, unfiltered, impersonal interview. Prepare to meet DONOVAN REYES, author of denouement and apocrypha.

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Q: Why did you choose this title?
A: “Denouement” is French for unraveling, and it felt appropriate for what I personally view as a novel with no real climax. My characters drift spectrally through the story, through the haunted house of suburbia.

Q: Why did you write this book?
A: I wrote it as a work of Expressionist literature, that which expresses fully the isolation, angst, and alienation I’ve felt growing up in Northern Virginia. It’s a single-person literary egregore, a fictive beast acting as a summation of the strangeness of the suburbs.

Q: Where/how do you write?
A: I would conjure up all the paranoia and unrest within me, nail the atmosphere first before anything else. In this I’m most indebted to Poe, one of my primary inspirations—the man could write mood like no other, and his sense of the gothic is total, complete, with the airless suffocation of a tomb. In “The Fall Of The House Of Usher,” for example, all the elements of the short story act like parts of one larger puzzle that allow Poe to achieve his effect. In a phrase, I want to make the reader feel like Fortunato being walled in by Montressor.

Q: As a writer, what is the biggest challenge you face?
A: Being too weird or violent or excessive (in my descriptions) for a lot of people. But what people generally perceive as flaws in art typically end up being the reasons why other people like that particular work, and so if I’m weirding people out with my work I think that’s a sign I’m going in the right direction. Life’s too short and I don’t have enough creativity in me to please everyone, so I just have to find my freaks! I need to create for the kind of readers who’re tuned into my frequency.

Q: What/who you do read?
A: Weird fiction, Southern Gothic, and French Decadent prose/poetry. The first informs the strangeness of my work, the second the religiosity intertwined with the grotesque (particularly the works of Ms. Flannery O’Connor, whom I wrote my bachelor’s thesis on), and for the third the floridity and the baroqueness of my phrasing. Charles Baudelaire and H.P. Lovecraft were massive for me. 

Q: What differentiates us from the animals?
A: The ability to create, for one. Spiders weaving intricate webs do it less out of a creative impulse and more because of their coding. The ‘Monkeys Typing Shakespeare’ theorem pops up frequently in many different contexts, but the difference between the monkeys and Shakespeare himself is that the monkeys “writing”, say, Macbeth or Hamlet would be doing so only by sheer chance, by happening upon a random combination of words that just so happens to be a line of dialogue from either play. There’s no agency, no deliberation on the words that are being typed, on the development of character, on the progression of plot. Shakespeare, of course, is no monkey. Only a human could have written how a human thinks, acts. 
And to extend this idea further, a machine (A.I.) is only replicatory. It can only reproduce what has been given to it, lacking the ability of invention. Theologically, I believe humanity is the only species that can create in the proper sense because we have been created in the Imago Dei, and as such we participate in His nature through creation, since creation is perhaps the most proper ability of the Creator. 

Q: Do you have a mantra?
A: Yes, I take mine from the title of Black Flag’s classic hardcore anthem “Rise Above”. The song has this myself-against-everything-else kind of mentality, and that was huge as a kid who grew up as a misfit and really only fit in in the subcultural fringe. I learned to grow resilient, and the D.I.Y. path, though difficult, has its own rewards. It’s never easy to forge ahead, but sometimes it’s the only thing you can do. 

Q: What is “cool”?
A: “Cool” has its own definitions when it comes to who’s perceiving something as such. But for me, “cool” is maintaining an operator-like sense of control but knowing when to really freak out when necessary. There should be a dynamic, like how Nietzsche postulates that truly great art can only result from a collaboration, a synthesis between the Dionysian (chaotic, drunken, loose) and Apollonian (orderly, sober, tight) forces. So “cool” to me can mean John Coltrane fluidly switching between scales or Joseph H.R. of Bad Brains doing backflips on stage and dancing like he’s being electrocuted. 

Q: Have you ever been on a pilgrimage? If yes, where to?
A: I’ve been on many religious ones, but the one that sticks out was more secular. I remember when I first traveled out of the country I went to Madrid, and went to the Museo Del Prado, their premier art museum. I found out they had Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights on display, and almost automatically I sought it out. This was a painting that had haunted me ever since childhood, with its lurid, surrealist visions prompted by the artist’s affliction by St. Anthony’s Fire, and once I found the exhibit I nearly fell upon my knees and wept as if stumbling across the corpse of a saint. It was as if a piece of my soul had been returned to me, by seeing it in person. 

Q: How often do you look in the mirror?
A: Until I dissociate. 

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Author’s bio: Donovan Reyes is the seething madman of a forgotten Poe tale, whose sinister rantings and ravings can be found within denouement (Anxiety Press, 2025) and apocrypha (self-published, 2025). His work had been published in such sordid sleaze-mags as Pixelated Shroud, Ex-Pat, and BRUISER. He shall be executed for his crimes against the English language. 

Book descriptions: 

denouement chronicles three young women drifting through the labyrinthine confines of suburbia late one night, a psychogeographic tale with flashes of weird fiction, acid house, Greco-Roman mythological allusion and more—like if Flannery O’Connor sought an asphalt-and-concrete-encrusted North to be Christ-haunted, or if Celine wrote Journey To The End Of The Night deep within the bowels of a sinister rave.

apocrypha is a collection of suburban gothic short stories and verse within the tradition of Poe and Baudelaire, coupled with the high strangeness of weird fiction and blended with noir Americana.

collages in interview by Donovan Reyes